Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute (PPI) is taking bold steps to improve access to inpatient and outpatient behavioral health services for patients from Dauphin, Cumberland, Perry, Lebanon, and York counties and beyond. A joint venture of Penn State Health and UPMC-Pinnacle, PPI is the region’s only academic free-standing psychiatric institute, and we’re committed to making it easier for people to receive services right when and where they need them through a targeted growth approach with an emphasis on:

PPI is helping to revolutionize management and treatment for patients who have opioid use disorders through its new Advancement in Recovery (AIR) Program / Opioid Treatment Program. The program recognizes medication-assisted treatment as the gold standard of care and provides a way to fast-track people who have an opioid use disorder into treatment. In addition, PPI is one of four Pennsylvania providers that has received a $1 million PA State grant to establish an innovative “hub-and-spoke” model of care to improve access to treatment for patients who have opioid use disorders and for providers who provide services to these patients.

At the end of March 2017, I became Chief Medical Officer for the Pennsylvania Psychiatric institute (PPI), a joint partnership between Penn State Health, the Department of Psychiatry at Penn State University College of Medicine and UPMC Pinnacle. After spending 28 years at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, where I served as Vice Chair for Clinical Affairs 2002-2017, I saw an opportunity to help PPI grow in its clinical services and partnerships to improve access to care and meet the behavioral health care needs of Central Pennsylvania with evidence-based, targeted programming.